Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technology to record an image written on printed matter.
Description of the Related Art
Technologies to read an image written on printed matter by the user and convert the image into electronic data so as to process the electronic data have been proposed.
According to the technology described in JP 2009-165088 A, the data management unit saves the original image data and creates the destination information about the destination to save the original image data in a printing process. The page data created in accordance with the size setting information and a two-dimensional code representing the destination information and the size setting information are synthesized so that output image data is created. Meanwhile, the code processing unit acquires the destination information and the size setting information from the two-dimensional code in the scanned image data in a difference extracting process. The original image data is acquired in accordance with the destination information. The difference reference data is created in accordance with the size setting information. The difference extraction unit extracts the difference between each page, data item in the difference reference data and each page data item in the scanned data pixel by pixel.
The PC described in JP 2012-199698 A includes a comparison unit, an OCR processing unit, and a registration unit. The comparison unit compares the image data of a scanned recoding medium on which the document data stored in a shared folder is printed with the image data of the document data so as to acquire an image of the difference between the image data of the scanned recoding medium and the image data of the document data. The OCR processing unit processes the acquired image data of the difference in a character recognizing process. The registration unit links the hand-written character data that is the character data acquired in the character recognizing process and the hand-written image data that is the image data of the difference to the document data, and saves the linked data in the shared folder.
The image processing apparatus described in JP 2010-262584 A includes a print control unit, an image input unit, an extraction unit, a difference image extraction unit, and a determination unit. The print control unit prints a plurality of pages on a paper medium in accordance with the print setting information indicating the print mode, and prints the code indicating the print setting information on the paper medium. The image input unit inputs the scanned image on the paper medium. The extraction unit extracts the code from the scanned image. The difference image extraction unit generates an image to be printed including the pages in accordance with the print setting information represented by the code extracted by the extraction unit so as to extract the difference image of the difference between the image to be printed and the scanned image. The determination unit determines the correspondence relationship between the difference image and the pages included in the image to be printed.
As described above, the image written on printed matter by the user (the written image) has been scanned and converted into electronic data, separately from the original document (the document printed on the printed matter), and then the electronic data has been linked to the electronic data of the document and saved in the past. The electronic data of the written image can be used for searching for the document.
However, the usage of the electronic data of the written image for the search requires a specific search system.